Cold and Miserable

Ugh.

That is the sum total of my reaction to my cold – I don’t have the energy to say any more. Why do I always get a cold just before going for a trek? I get so worried that it might develop into something more deadly, such as pulmonary oedema. Plus, it means I can’t go and play tennis, which I’m dying to do because my game has improved visibly in the recent past.

Meanwhile, it has been a fairly productive weekend. We managed to cancel our IC tickets. This was necessary because the airline had kindly preponed both our arrival in Leh and our departure from Leh by a day. We didn’t mind so much about arriving in Leh a day early, even if it meant taking an extra day’s leave and re-booking our tickets from Bangalore to Delhi. But preponing our return from Leh was a really nasty thing to do, as we planned to still be out in the wilds somewhere at that time. We had to make a trip to the airport to cancel the tickets. The traffic at the airport at 10.30 at night has to be seen to be believed. Since I had already seen it in the fairly recent past, we went at 3.30 in the afternoon and it was a breeze.

Of course, as luck would have it, as soon as we got home at 9.30 that night, we discovered that our other flight, re-booked from Bangalore to Delhi a day early to accommodate the flight to Leh, had been pushed out by almost three hours. If the airline pushes it out by three hours, they have to refund customers’ cash, so they don’t do that until they actually have you in the airport, boarding pass in hand. Considering that our flight to Leh leaves Delhi at the crack of dawn, we’d have to wake in the dead of night to catch it anyway. Now, with our flight reaching Delhi somewhere in the wee hours (well, alright, 10.30 p.m. is not exactly the wee hours, but by the time you get your luggage off the carousel, get home, eat, sleep… it’s almost time to wake up again!) it looked like being an altogether sleepless night. So now, we have to cancel those tickets and book yet another flight. Surely this is good for the economy – some airlines gain customers, some lose, but at least several trips to the airport are involved and the parking attendants make hay at 60 bucks just to enter the parking lot.

So, once all the dust settles, I still don’t know whether I’m coming or going, or where or when or how.

At least I’ve made some progress on my sample assignment for Archaeology. I’ve put down some 1200 words, which took me four hours, which is the slowest I’ve ever written anything since I learnt to hold a pencil! And this is only a sample.

That apart, on Sunday evening we did so much shopping on credit card that the credit card company actually called to ask us whether our card had been stolen! That tells you something about the extent to which we normally use our credit cards. I have to say that I was pretty impressed with HDFC bank, which in the recent past has not done a single thing to impress me.

I get the impression that this is a pretty garbled blog, but I put it down to: